Social selling tips: how to mine leads on social media

Social selling is the new, improved way to go about finding and fielding leads online. Smart salespeople and business owners are already starting to incorporate social media into their leads funnel and for good reason. It is becoming increasingly harder to set up meetings with potential clients, spam filters are more sophisticated (so you can’t always e-mail whoever you want) and social media is where many people are spending their time online.

One challenge many salespeople struggle with, is picking up on sales signals on social media. If you’ve already connected with everyone who could potentially buy from you, how do you expand your social circles so that you know when someone is looking for a product or service that you have to offer?

One way to do this is to set up a lead mining toolbox which will notify you when someone is searching for a product or service that relates to your business. Here are a few ways:

Google alerts: You can set up Google alerts for keyword phrases which relate to your business. You will get a daily, weekly or real-time notification whenever related content is found on Google.

Twitlerts: This is the same as Google alerts, but it notifies you when tweets containing the search phrases you’re interested in appear on Twitter.

Tweetdeck: This is a great tool for anyone who wants to manage different user and content streams on Twitter. It’s free and gives you an easy to way to pick up on search terms related to your business, follow potential leads and much more.